The Evolution of Python for Data Science

Click here to learn more about author Steve Miller. I’ve been programming in Python for almost 15 years. When I started around 2001, I was doing most of my non-statistical work in C and Perl, the early days of Fortran, PL/I, and Pascal thankfully by then long gone. Just as with R for statistical computing, I now like that Python is an open source, with a large engaged developer community. I also love that the language is simple and easy to work with. You can pick up the basics quickly – write productive code that’s both terse and easy to maintain. And there’s plenty of goodies for free from the Python community. Life’s good. To progress up the Python curve, I developed prototypes to manage similar stock index performance data I’d…